Mourning in America

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Michael Jackson

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The slew of celebrity deaths has consumed journalists as well. CNN's prime-time viewership spiked nearly 40 percent in the days after Jackson and Fawcett died. The newsweeklies got a big boost too; virtually every major publication, including this one, put Jackson's face on its cover (EW's sister magazine TIME was among the first, crashing a special issue within 36 hours). What's more, the singer's death will likely be remembered as a milestone in the evolution of the Internet. Twitter doubled its traffic in the hours after the news broke, clogging the Web with up to 5,000 tweets per minute. Texting on AOL's Instant Messenger was so heavy that the service went down for 40 minutes. ''Today was a seminal moment in Internet history,'' AOL proclaimed in a statement released the evening of Jackson's and Fawcett's death. ''We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.''

Actually, we have seen something like it before — many, many times. The mountain of flowers left for Princess Di at the gates of Buckingham Palace. The stream of tourists who still make the pilgrimage every year to Elvis' grave at Graceland, or to Jim Morrison's in Paris, or to Marilyn Monroe's at Westwood. The living have always mourned their famous dead — the only difference now is that it's televised on 24-hour cable and amplified by social-networking sites that let grieving fans share their feelings just by tapping on an iPhone app.

''When a celebrity dies, two things happen,'' says Susan Davies, a grief counselor in Los Angeles and author of the bereavement book After I'm Gone. ''The first is that we're reminded of our own mortality. It reminds us that time is marching on and that someday we're going to be dead too. But a lot of times a celebrity's death will also remind us of a certain time in our life — the way you danced to Michael Jackson in the 1980s, for instance. When he dies, you also mourn that part of your life. You're reminded that part of your life is gone. That it's never coming back.''

But it does come back — on screens big and small. This Is It, for instance, could turn out to be a defining cultural event not only for those who danced to the singer's music in the '80s but also for a new generation. ''There's really no telling how huge this movie is going to be,'' says Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office for Hollywood.com. ''It'd be like trying to predict what Passion of the Christ was going to do, or The Blair Witch Project. Jackson's death makes the movie bigger than the sum of its parts. Remember how well Dark Knight did after Heath Ledger's death? It could easily have that sort of effect.''

All of which is bittersweet, of course. But there's comfort in the knowledge that today icons really can live forever. The entertainers we once sang along with and laughed at and cried over no longer disappear when they die. Thanks to iTunes and cable-TV marathons and special DVD reissues, dearly departed stars can continue to move, amuse, and enchant us forever.

(Additional reporting by Jeff Labrecque, Keith Staskiewicz, Tanner Stransky, and Kate Ward)